Matching text between hyphens with regex

regex hyphen
James Mclaren picture James Mclaren · Nov 8, 2012 · Viewed 10.2k times · Source

Currently I have this string

"RED-CURRENT_FORD-something.something"

I need to capture the word between the hypens. In this case the word CURRENT_FORD

I have the following written

\CURRENT_.*\B-\

Which returns CURRENT_FORD- which is wrong on two levels.

  1. It implies that everything between hyphens starts with CURRENT
  2. It includes the hyphen at the end.

Any more efficient way of capturing the words in between the hyphens without explicitly stating the first word?

Answer

Jason McCreary picture Jason McCreary · Nov 8, 2012

You can use the delimiters to help bound your pattern then capture what you want with parentheses.

/-([^-]+)-/

You can then trim the hyphens off.

Related questions

Python Regex for hyphenated words

I'm looking for a regex to match hyphenated words in python. The closest I've managed to get is: '\w+-\w+[-w+]*' text = "one-hundered-and-three- some text foo-bar some--text" hyphenated = re.findall(r'\w+-\w+[-\w+]*',…

Read More
Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word

I know it's possible to match a word and then reverse the matches using other tools (e.g. grep -v). However, is it possible to match lines that do not contain a specific word, e.g. hede, using a regular …

Read More
How to validate an email address in JavaScript

Is there a regular expression to validate an email address in JavaScript?

Read More